Is this worth it? Should I bother? At what point does the “low” in “low-art” stoop so low it no longer justifies serious analysis?

In Bad Grandpa, Jackass daredevil-cum-actor Johnny Knoxville, under a thick layer of makeup and prosthetics, plays a disgusting geriatric who goes on a series of drunken adventures with his 8-year-old grandson.

The incorrigible Irving Zisman (Knoxville) gets his penis caught in a vending machine, cracks onto young women and is wheeled around in a supermarket trolley as his dead wife gradually decomposes in his car trunk.

As if prompted by Oliver Stone’s cartel-themed drug drama Savages, in which Benicio del Toro gulped down co-star Blake Lively’s saliva and later likened it to fried chicken, fellow Hollywood heavyweight Ridley Scott breaks bad with another star-driven sun-baked story about dodgy deals and gnarly repercussions.

The Counselor is set on the Tex-Mex border, with Michael Fassbender headlining as a lawyer known only by his eponymous title. It’s unclear whether the language with which he is regarded — “hello Counselor,” “goodbye Counselor,” “thank you Counselor,” “‘scuse me Counselor — is intended to mark an Eastwood-like man with no name, duty bound and purpose driven, or is being used for ironic reasons.

Then again a lot is left willfully unclear in the debut screenplay of Cormac McCarthy, writer of Pulitzer-winning post-apocalyptic walkabout novel The Road and the literary source of the Coen brothers’ Oscar-winning manhunt drama No Country for Old Men (2007).

There are too many superhero movies! Hollywood is infantilising audiences! These days directors care more about action figurines than real characters!

Take a deep breath. Relax. And shut up.

While teenagers and young adults continue to inject windfalls of cash into the film industry — literally buying bucket loads of popcorn and snacks and investing heavily in ancillary markets such as VOD, DVD and video games — the argument continues that Tinseltown is pumping out way too many salt-burn superhero pics that are way too similar.

Hanks’ name appears in bright red letters above the title. Its colour-matched to the words “based on a true story” which sit below a clump of squashed credits naming cast and crew, including the person who directed it: Paul Greengra-something-or-other.

It’s not his name that matters. “From the director of The Bourne Ultimatum” carries more currency with mainstream plebs and PR bootlickers, a line that hints at the old Hollywood dictum that you’re only as good as your last picture (or the last one the general public remember you for).

The movement of 40s and 50s crime films from which the neo-noir genre inherited its name is mostly populated by rapidly sequenced 90-or-so minute pictures, their distinctive aesthetic rarely taking priority over the progression of a story.

Not so in writer/director Ivan Sen’s outback NSW-set Mystery Road, which, though it might look like a western, is structured like noir.

The death of a teenage girl (in older films, she would likely have been missing rather than murdered) propels Jay Swan (Aaron Pederson) to investigate. The Indigenous detective sticks his nose into places it doesn’t, as they say, belong, his gruffly obstinate matter-of-fact methods getting both local authorities and locals themselves off-side.

If you could go back in time whenever you liked, introduce yourself to the object of your affections again and again and keep refining your pick up moves until eventually this person fell for you, does that make you a romantic or a creep? Is it true love or an elaborate manipulation?

The protagonist in About Time, the latest syrup-lacquered rom-com from Love Actually and Bridget Jones’ Diary writer/director Richard Curtis, discovers at age 21 that if he retreats to a quiet place and clenches his fists he can zap himself back to the past and relive any moment of his life.

Father and mentor Bill Nighy advises him not to go crazy. Keep your goals modest, he says, correctly inferring the story about to unfold will not be the stuff of Sports Alamanacs, DeLoreans and tricked-up phone booths.

In Howard Suber’s screenwriting textbook The Power of Film, the UCLA lecturer argues there is no such thing as an antihero. Instead, there “are only characters who act heroically and those who do not.”

If we watch a person drive down a street, see a house on fire and run inside to rescue an elderly lady, we naturally bestow on them the status of a hero. If we watch a person drive down a street, see a house on fire, and respond by looking at their watch, grumbling and racing off to an appointment, he or she is not an antihero (so the logic goes) but simply a person who is not a hero yet.

That argument begins, if not to unravel, then certainly to enter far muddier territory when a character performs an otherwise unconscionable act because they believe it is in service of a wider moral imperative; muddier still if that moral imperative may not be obviously the “right” one. In other words, if a person believes they are doing awful things because they are acting heroically.

The real-life events that defined the headline-hogging animosity between Formula 1 racers James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and Niki Lauda (Daniel Bruhl), whose public spats and fierce rivalry engrossed sports fans in the 1970s, is perfect fodder for dramatisation.

Ron Howard’s new movie Rush is a foot-to-the-pedal sports movie broad enough to appeal to non-petrol heads, such is the director’s middle of the road sensibilities. The 59-year-old filmmaker’s extensive body of work (A Beautiful Mind, Back Draft, The Da Vinci Code, Apollo 13, Willow etc) suggests a genetic incapability to make niche pictures.

In a gift to dramatic convenience, Howard’s two main characters are polar opposites. Hunt is the handsome bad boy Englishman and Lauda, the disciplined Austrian who doesn’t like taking risks.

In Mexican writer/director Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2007), a science fiction drama set in a future world where humankind no longer has the ability to procreate, several elaborate long takes evolve the film from a visually impressive work to one of gut-punching bravado.

An engrossing three-and-a-half minute shot positioned inside a car captures the sudden death of a key character played by Julianne Moore, who is shot in the head by a bikie as Clive Owen hopelessly flaps about on the seat behind her.

Cuarón recently described this tremendous take as a “happy accident.” During filming, fake blood splattered on the lens. The director yelled “cut” but amid the roar of explosions and gunfire nobody heard him. The camera kept rolling and the footage was discovered in the editing room.

At first it feels like a vanity project: an elaborate exercise in navel-gazing from a famous actor convinced there must be something awfully important about her own middle class upbringing.

It is to the credit of Canadian actor/writer Sarah Polley that her debut documentary, Stories We Tell, evolves from a talking heads sit-down exploring family relations and the freewheeling personality of her late mother, Dianne (she died young, when Polley was 11), to something much more ambitious.

The film begins with a voiceover of a Margaret Atwood quote: “when you’re in the middle of a story, it isn’t a story at all, it’s a confusion.”

The films of Michel Gondry seem to germinate in a waking life, the detritus of a series of long naps from which the 50-year-old French director emerges, squinting at the daylight, with a fresh set of dreamy ideas.

Some of his films take a direct look at sleep and memory (The Science of Sleep, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). Others play kooky premises straight (Human Nature, Be Kind Rewind).

In Gondry’s latest head trip, Mood Indigo, you won’t blink when you see a four inch tall man dressed in a rat costume driving a tiny car. It’s that sort of film. Immediately afterwards, Gondry cuts to a man who puts on a tie by having it hammered into him with nails. The tie is alive (naturally) and flopping about like a fish drowning in oxygen.

In James L. Brooks’ 1997 romantic comedy As Good As It Gets, brilliant misanthropic author Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson) is approached by a nervous doe-eyed fan who musters the courage to ask him how he writes women so well. The curmudgeon snaps back: “I think of a man. And I take away reason and accountability.”

Reason and accountability are not virtues common in the personalities of Woody Allen protagonists. They are colourful loose-lipped creatures who tend to be iterations of a single voice syndrome – that of neurotic foggy-minded people floundering about in prisons of their own anxiety.

In Blue Jasmine, a characteristically verbose Woody Allen drama given real oomph and humanity by a wide-ranging performance from Cate Blanchett, the prison is more of an asylum — a place where Allen-brand angst spills into something much more serious than mealy-mouthed shtick.